Best Supporting Services Provider: Axon Financial Systems

Keeping up to date with market data obligations and understanding where data goes once it has entered an organization are essential to remaining compliant with exchange policies and avoiding excessive fees. 

Axon Financial Systems, judged the winner of the Best Supporting Services Provider award for the second consecutive year, takes its role beyond consultancy and offers clients a full portfolio of product-based services to support understanding of—and compliance with—the rules, pricing and policies of exchanges, freeing up market data teams to focus on more valuable activities.

At the heart of Axon’s offering is its Policies, Explanations, Analytics, Repository (PEAR) platform—an online self-service portal that contains standardized, searchable datasets of regulations, rules and pricing for exchanges and other data content originators. “PEAR reduces the time needed to source and understand the many market data policies and pricing models of exchanges, and keeps users up to date with the latest announcements from a database of around 220 markets,” says Aaron Garforth, Axon’s CIO and co-founder. The company monitors more than 600 exchange documents daily.

Other services in Axon’s armoury include the outsourced Declaration Service (ADS), where Axon takes on the exchange and vendor reporting responsibility for clients. ADS automates the time-consuming elements of preparing exchange and vendor declarations through the implementation of exchange rules sourced from PEAR and client-specific rules sets. “This systematic approach removes repetitive manual processes, leaving the client in control of the workflow and approvals,” Garforth says.

The company also offers an Application Compliance Tool (ACT), an online bespoke questionnaire that helps clients profile their proprietary applications’ market data usage through regular recertification. By connecting with PEAR, ACT provides a view of the exchange compliance obligations for a firm’s applications, allowing users to quickly identify licensing and policy requirements.

Over the past year, Axon has focused on developing add-ons to the PEAR database. These include a PEAR application programming interface, which gives clients access to PEAR’s data in a machine-readable format for use in their own systems and processes, and COMPEAR, which enables users to compare previous exchange documents with the current versions side by side. Particularly useful is its ability to highlight what has been removed or changed in the previous document and what has been added in the new one.

The company has also launched the Axon Declaration Portal (ADP) this year, a service aimed at exchanges and vendors to help them collect and manage their customers’ market data usage declarations. ADP automatically sends out reminders and merges the client data into a central database for any exchange or vendor that is deploying the portal. 

Read more about the Inside Market Data & Inside Reference Data Awards 2019 winners